Page 5 of The Space Between Stars

Location: Jiradesh Desert

Sixty hours .

A body would expire within sixty hours at the heart of the Jiradesh without water.

Calver sat in the pre-dawn dark of the desert, eyes closed, fingers digging into the sand. Not the powdery sand of Kaidech’s beaches; gritty, compact sand, too hot beneath the sun, too cold beneath the moon, abrasive enough to have worn through his only boots in a ten-day. He visualized his dowagian forms, the martial study he’d built his life around. If he was lucky, visiting them in daydreams might compensate for his crippling lack of a weapon… but Calver was seldom lucky.

After ten hours beneath the wicked Jiradeshi highsun, the body’s blood would thicken and slow in the way that sap turns to amber. After thirty, it would lose enough of its retained fluids to fail to perspire. After fifty, its kidneys would no longer filter. In the end, it would be the body’s own unfiltered waste that killed it. The irony did not escape Calver that death, in this way, was a byproduct of living.

Just as his own was destined to be.

But not yet. A full year stood between him and the Tera’thian coronation. He needed to keep his skills sharp if he wanted to make it that far. He might be free, temporarily pardoned until a formal trial was held for him in Seraphinden, but he was surrounded by enemies. Because the Red Wing’s restrictive orders against him kept him from training with the recruits, he trained alone, at night, and at a distance.

Time passed to a steady overture of whistling wind and fading starlight. Despite his best efforts, Calver’s mind strayed west, in the direction of the Rollard Isles. As they’d left things, there was little guarantee Fankalo would hold an audience with him. But when the Red Wing came closer to the shore on its three-month course toward Steila, he would still take his chance. With the Survivor, the sinister spirit that had possessed him since childhood, finally absent, he could face her without fear of bloodshed. Not that she would understand the difference. Fankalo had never grasped the line where the Survivor stopped and he began. Only Raimee ever had.

Raimee… She had dropped into his life—the heir to Seraphindo’s throne, with unthinkable powers but no control over them—and they’d spent two ten-days unraveling a conspiracy neither of them understood. Together.

Calver swallowed the thought. Forced himself to visualize a swing, a parry, a pivot.

There it was: that ever-pressing itch. He missed that little scholar like this desert missed the rain. But she was an impossible thing, and even if he were to have her, he wouldn’t know what to do with her.

That didn’t make him any less thirsty.

He opened his eyes. Stars of every hue blossomed through celestial dust, flung from the distant dunes into the heavens like frozen volcanic plumes. There was no point in reminiscing. Raimee had clung to him because she had been backed into a corner. Now that she’d had some space to reflect on what he’d done, now that she’d spent time around civilized people, she was probably lifting a prayer of thanks that she hadn’t wound up tethered to him.

She was with Roskaad Thyatira, now—the Red Wing’s General Prime, the man who had sliced out Calver’s tongue when he was twelve and sentenced him to become a walking science experiment. Raimee had probably already told him everything, given them information Calver had let slip to her. It was probably exactly what they needed to pin Fankalo down. They might have captured his sister already. She might have a blade over her neck this very second. She—

The hairs on Calver’s arms rose, stirred by no desert breeze. He resisted the urge to turn. It was a twenty-minute walk from the Red Wing’s encampment to the rocky crags he’d found for solitude. If someone had come, they had not done so by coincidence.

Calver listened through the ever-present sounds of the desert for several breaths: the chittering of an insect, the whisper of breeze, the rasping of dry brush needles. Then, without precursor, came an acute pattering. A sloshing of fluid.

He had been watched since the beginning of the Red Wing’s campaign. Command wouldn’t have given him freedom—regardless of royal pardon—if they weren’t watching him. But he doubted they worried he would run. This deep into the Jiradesh, days from any known settlement, they assumed the desert to be its own trial, with only one sentence.

The sound stopped. Someone watched him from behind a cluster of sedimentary spurs that jutted from the sands like gnarled fingers. Whoever it was released a bated breath.

The steps crept closer. Close enough. Calver spun into a crouch to regard his foe.

Raimee chuckled at his defense—a slight thing, not mocking but genuine. A pack weighed her down, loaded with canteens and—his chest expanded—a dowaga, the three-bladed weapon as vital to him as a limb.

It was as though the sand had shifted beneath him. Not real. Too good to be real. Between the warring compulsions to pull her into his arms or run as far and fast as he could in the opposite direction, Calver could not move.

Her lilting lisp honeyed his ears. “Remember me?”

He hadn’t been able to forget. Not even for a second.

“Let’s go.” She let the pack slip from her shoulders and to the sand, as though inviting him to inspect it. He didn’t need to. It would not last them two days in the Jiradesh. “Should last us a tenday. We won’t have long before they realize I’m gone, but we can get a head start.”

Not if they weren’t on horseback. Even then, Calver hadn’t intended to move west until the distance to the coast was at its shortest, when the Red Wing drew parallel with Thaligan, in two months.

But all intent to argue fled him in a single glance. The spaces beneath her cheeks were hollow. Her body was frail all over again, like in Chira’na when he’d worried her sickness would take her.

The way the first drop from a stormcloud raced to cracked earth, Calver closed the gap between them. His hand found her chin. He lifted it and turned her face from side to side, looking for any indication of abuse or ailment.

Raimee startled, like she had been expecting something different.

Calver retracted.

Touching her enlivened his every sense. Raw power coursed through his veins. The pieces took shape inside his mind, forming something sharp enough to wound. Was she like this because of… because of him? Had he been the common denominator of Raimee’s illness all along? She’d healed him the last time they were together. Neither of them had stayed conscious through the end of it.